The Children's Bach
child, throwing up on train as I held nausea
child, hitting his head into the corner of the table I had left briefly to make a cup of milk tea
friend, emergency keyhole surgery for twisted bowels
The two boxes of pastries from the souvenir store at Kawaguchiko were slightly crushed in the check-in luggage. I had forgotten about them in my angry, exhausted haze of repacking at the airport. He saw the animal rage in me and still loved me.
Laundry and unpacking after coming back are interesting Tetris exercises. Everything in its parts, each given due process and place. Life is reset somehow.
The Children's Bach by Helen Garner, stunning in its brevity of the sentence. It showed me more clearly, building on George Saunders' guidance, that I could enter the writing of a novel via the unit of the sentence. The sentence could be the scale of my inquiry, and that makes the hulk of a novel sound more feasible in construction. I find the moment-to-moment operation most pleasurable. A site of intuition, delicacy, instinct, weaving, small needle and thread. The tapestry is at back of mind but never a foregrounded urgency.
Suddenly it has always been possible to be part of not only a snapshot of a relationship, but a composition, like an image we can look at again and again, finding it familiar and yet never seeing all of it at once such that every seeing is also new, suddenly the relationship has a body called Time and we are composed within it, two foetal shapes enfolding, organs arranged in organic viscosity, turning translucent by light punching into air.